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Its interesting to note that according to Ziggy, almost 50% of the brand new modules on CPAN were uploaded in 2003.

First, we need to remember that there are lies, statistics and misinterpreted statistics.

The numer I came up with is from analyzing the modules list. This includes some duplication (mod_perl is listed twice; there are three distributions of AcePerl at the top of the list) and some exclusions (perl-5.8.x.tar.gz is not listed, nor is Meta).

Do that computation again, but this time leave off the Acme namespace and use the ls-lR since the modules list is incomplete and still manually maintained.

The conclusion is obvious, if not terribly important, but statistics lie too often, especially around those who like pie charts. CPAN is the only thing that is doing well in the perl world right now...you don't need a bar graph to tell anyone that.

Parroting received wisdom ("CPAN is the only thing that is doing well in Perl", "You can do more with Perl because it is «more expressive»", "Perl 6 is the future of Perl") doesn't do anyone any favors.

Parroting? You say that like we don't pay attention to CPAN. We do, but we don't publish statistics just because we run the joint. Publishing inaccurate and misleading statistics don't do anyone any favours most of all. Statistics are the tool with which people lie to others as well as to themselves. An example would be download statistics from across the mirrors which would make a lot of people happy and generate quite a few exciting numbers, but the numbers would lie since they wouldn't be the whole story, would they? Just the same for using the file timestamp to determine freshness on a module within a distribution....all it means is someone uploaded a distribution, not that they updated anything more than a typo.

A sociologist would be reluctant to make such conclusions or assumptions based on the results from shoving a few files into a script which generated lots of numbers. People aren't so easily qualified by the quantity of things.

No, I say that because a lot of pro-Perl scentiments are repeated endlessly without any critical analysis. If you actually read what I said, you'd see that I'm not singling out CPAN, nor am I not accusing CPAN's maintainers of not paying attention.

I also never attributed any mystical properties to an uploaded distribution, so please don't say that I did. As I said before, the only thing an upload means is that someone created or updated a file on C